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News, announcements, and other tidbits of liveSite love

Announcing liveSite 7.0

New Features

Here is a list of the major new features in liveSite 7.0. We also fixed numerous small issues, of course.

New Rich-text Editor

liveSite now has a new content editor. The new editor is nicer looking, faster, provides full support for Mac browsers, and allows you to embed JavaScript in your content. We have added some new features too, like "Select All" and separated the 'Block Quote' and 'Indention' styling options.

New Photo Gallery

The Photo Gallery feature has been completely redesigned to use the popular 'lightbox' format, so you can view photo in their original orientation and size. We also added the ability to drill down into multiple photo albums from a single Photo Gallery page.

More Interactive Pages

Now you can add a number of "system" regions to any page. For example, you now can create a page that has a photo gallery, a blog, a custom form, form views, and a calendar view, all on the same page! There is no limit to the combinations of Page Types you can now blend together with this powerful feature.

Import/Export Themes

You can now backup or share themes between your liveSites. We have a growing set of customizable liveSite themes you can download from our knowledge base and apply them instantly to your liveSite.

Enhanced Comment Feature

We have enhanced the comment feature to provide for more finite control over your website postings. Now you can decide whether visitors must login before they can add a comment, whether they can remain anonymous when posting, and even enable or disable new comments on any page at any time.

Improved CAPTCHA Control

The CAPTCHA (spam protection) feature can now be enabled or disabled for all public forms on your site, if necessary.

Enhanced Cart Region

Cart Regions have been enhanced to be more dynamic. They will not display anything if there are no items in the current session's cart. If there are items in the current session's cart, the items and subtotal is displayed, and linked to the most recent shopping cart or express order page visited. This allows you to create multiple checkout processes for different audiences, and the cart region will navigate the visitor to the correct checkout page automatically.

Improved Login Region

You can now disable the login form from being displayed for more control over the visitor's experience. This is useful if you want to display the user's name if they are logged it, or nothing it they are not.

Improved E-Mail Campaigns

liveSite now strips out JavaScript automatically from page designs before e-mailing them to prevent spam security errors in some e-mail clients. Also, Form List View pages that are sent via e-mail campaigns now support personalization (e.g. "name" field).

Expiring Tracking Codes

liveSite tracking codes (browser cookies) now expire themselves after 6 months to prevent old tracking codes from showing up again in Visitor Reports.

Control Panel Improvements

We added many small improvements to the liveSite Control Panel so it is less cluttered, and now notifies you when new software updates are available.

Software Subscriptions

We will continue to offer great liveSite hosting services, but we are also releasing liveSite 7.0 as software, so you can now host it anywhere. liveSite 7.0 takes only a few minutes to install, and will run on any Linux or Windows server, or any shared hosting account running PHP / MySQL. We have even found a way around the costly up-front software licensing fees by creating a new software subscription with an introductory price of only $10!

To offset the cost of offering the software without upfront software costs, we did have to add advertising, but only to the liveSite control panel. We also added a tiny "Powered by liveSite" link to the footer of the website. However, these can be instantly removed if you purchase a software subscription. Software customers running version 4.5+ can download the upgrade for free.

New Community Website

To support our new focus on low-cost software subscriptions, we have revamped our website to help build community among all the liveSite fans. We are excited to provide a place online for web designers and builders to join together and share their experiences and expertise. As you contribute to the community, our hope is that you will prosper by finding new clients that need your help.

Free support from our Core Team will be channeled through the community forum as well, instead of through private support conversations. This new community approach to support will help keep the cost of liveSite down, allow others to benefit from the expertise, and help our developers stay focused on adding more great features. If, however, you do need a skilled web developer from our Core Team at a moment's notice, you will be able to purchase project credits for as little as $29.